The best and worst gifts Blogmas#19

 This post will be written by my mum, as it's her birthday today! So I give her the honour of writing the post herself. 

Let's start thinking.

1. I got a lot of money, which I spent mostly on buying lipstick or make up for myself and on sweets. The most interesting thing about all this is that until now no one has ever asked me how much money or dinars my grandparents gave me. We were still in Yugoslavia at that time. And we used dinars for money.

2. Here I could put a collection of plush toys in natural colours. But the condition was that they had to be at least a few cm big. I wanted to have a whole collection of these toys, but in the end it all got spoiled, because I was getting even older at that time than I was before. They are dust catchers, for good measure.

3. The one that sticks with me the most is the Dawnhill camera or something like it. I really wanted one and when I got it I burst into tears because I was so glad I had got it in the first place. From then on I have been in touch with photography ever since.

4. This was at my daughter's boarding school in Ljubljana. As my parents were having a parents' workshop that week, my daughter made me a blueberry muffin. Only I didn't realise at the time that she had her fingers in between. So she told her boarding school teacher that it was my birthday that day. If I remember correctly, I was 46 at the time, or close to 50. When my parents came into the meeting room, I saw Marincek in the background, but the two teachers kept hiding him from me. But when one of the teachers started the topic of what we wanted or what we were happy about, she finally played her trick by putting a blueberry muffin in front of me with a candle that I could blow out with my breath. At that moment they sang me the song Happy Birthday and one of the teachers took a picture of me with it. I was of course very surprised at the time, because I didn't expect them to know when my birthday was. When my daughter came to visit us, she told me what a surprise she had prepared for me at the parents' workshop that day. We parents had this workshop every month during the school year, so that we could learn something about bringing up our children and also take something away from it. Well, the little marigold with the candle went home with me afterwards. And because I like to share what I get, I offered it to my mother. In the end we cut it in half and ate it. But I have to admit that he was quite violent to eat. I still have a picture of me with this blueberry muffin and a candle hanging under a picture in my bedroom to remind me of my birthday, which I unexpectedly celebrated in boarding school in Ljubljana.

I cannot remember the rest of the presents, even though I am just over 50.

5. As for my birthday, it is like this, because I am one of the few who have it more towards the end of the year, or 6 days before Christmas. In my childhood we celebrated it. But sometimes, or almost mostly, we combined it with the coming New Year. So that I didn't have to give more presents than just for my birthday. We didn't know Santa at that time. I didn't believe in St. Nicholas either, because I never went to our church. My father was a communist and he never went to church. In fact, you were not allowed to go. Today we would call it being in two parties.

Finally, another anecdote that I remember from my childhood.

My mother and I often went to Maribor by train to visit her mother and stepfather. At that time, steam or wood-burning locomotives were used. And the carriages were such that you were swaying back and forth. Usually, the train went directly from Litija to Maribor without any overrunning. Today, of course, you have to change at Zidane Most. And those locomotives were blowing their smoke directly past the windows when I wanted to look at the scenery I was admiring. And then that smoke went past the window, so that, unfortunately for me, I could not see anything outside. And I wouldn't have been me if I hadn't told my mother to take that smoke away so that I could see something outside. Her answer was that she couldn't move it because it was from the locomotive. I burst into tears, so in the end she had to calm me down.

So my mother turned 57 today. She has never hidden her years, so I won't either! 

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